Everyone wants their website to look great, right? But we often see organisations forget about the content. Not so at one local authority which has invested in improving the content it shares with its customers.

Budget cuts continue to hit all parts of the public sector. The communications industry has responded and has worked with these cuts for years now. This new survey puts a spotlight on the future of the magazines created for housing customers.

We've come a long way, baby, as country singer Loretta Lynn once sang. Once, the idea of using social media in the public sector was bold and revolutionary. Now it is common place. Perhaps the greatest thing about this is that it puts a human face onto civil servants who are human too.

When I joined the civil service nearly a decade ago, we were in the midst of MySpace, Msn and Friends Reunited (with a sprinkling of the ‘very professional’ LinkedIn). Soon after, Facebook appeared with its open API, Twitter with its own and with fantastic ease you could post or tweet about almost anything.

The UnAwards15 saw 140 colleagues from across the industry descend on the very cool Everyman Cinema in Birmingham last Thursday. The mood was one of big event excitement - Christmas party meets trip to a posh cinema mixed with lashing of great communicators celebrating one another’s work.

Holding the UnAwards at Christmas is deliberate too – we wanted to add a little festive sparkle to the proceedings.

We’re a tad biased but we felt the whole day was a little bit special.

Sitting watching the fabulous Planes, Trains and Automobiles with what felt like a great big group of pals was pretty amazing. The film had a whole bunch of relevant messages and takeaways (and if you have ever watched the movie remember – ‘never assume you are cuddling a pillow’)

Wondering if and where Snapchat might fit into your comms mix? This great case study from a leading social media manager in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sheds a very helpful light on a platform you may not have yet used.

Over 140 entries poured into the UnAwards15 from across the UK and from as far afield as Norway.

Central government, local government, NHS, Police, Housing, Fire, Higher Education, third sector and the agency world all took part and our 14 external judges have had quite a task in getting down to our final shortlist.

The standard of your entries this year has been high. We know this because some of our judges are hard to impress, But impressed they were.

Our love and respect for this fabulous comms, PR, marketing and digital community, which we all exist in, just grows and grows and thank you so much for supporting the #UnAwards15.

Print is dead, right? Maybe not. On the day the NME became a free sheet available at train stations and TopMan, Louder Than War expanded from their success online and launched as a glossy magazine. Editor of louderthanwar.com Sarah Lay shares her experience of growing from digital to include print.

The first issue of Louder Than War magazine featured the Stone Roses on the cover and was titled ‘I Wanna Be Adored’. In truth it could have carried another song title from the band, ‘I Am the Resurrection’, and been just as fitting for Louder Than War’s bold move into print.

That’s right, as the increasingly hysterical cry of ‘print is dead’ resounds and on the day that stalwart of the music press NME moved to become a free sheet given out in train stations, Louder Than War made the dauntless move to swim against the tide and launch as a glossy, paid-for, magazine. While that sinks in let me introduce you to Louder Than War properly.

The chances of there being a comms person out there today who doesn’t think that reviewing and evaluating their work is important will be tiny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – we know it’s important, but when there are 10 people asking for my help, three comms plans to write, the phone ringing off the hook and the impacts of a comms team which has been cut in half it’s a lot easier said than done.

Sound familiar? Yep, me too.

Amongst the many things I learned in 10 years of leading comms teams it’s that standing back and taking a good hard look at your work is 1. Absolutely vital, and 2. Something of a luxury to do often and well. Like wanting a brand new car but settling for paying the bare minimum to get the old car through another year’s MOT (and that sounds familiar too)

With the consultancy work I have been doing with comms2point0 I have had the incredible opportunity to review a dozen organisation’s communications activity in microscopic detail. This is fascinating work and I thoroughly engross myself in the detail of these reviews. They tell stories and give clear indicators to the ‘what should we do next?’ question.

Well, I wasn't going to. And I didn't seek it out but the new John Lewis TV ad gives a perfect lesson for where comms is right now.

You may know it. It's a two minute film of a little girl spotting the man on the moon looking sad and sending him a present to cheer him up at Christmas time. An old Oasis b-side has been re-recorded for the music.

Not watching much television I wasn't aware of it. But of course, I remember the penguin TV ad from last year. But I didn't have to watch TV to find out about the new TV ad. It was being discussed on BBC Radio 5 on the way home and all over Twitter.

In September, the Staff Charity of the Wales Audit Office took on a mammoth task – to walk the entire coast of Wales in 24 hours. And we did it, all 870 miles of it. Whilst the undertaking of the task was an impressive feat in and of itself, I was also impressed by how our staff used social media to communicate their trials, tribulations and ultimately, their success.

We run the UnAwards to support and – in our own way - fly a flag for folks across the UK and beyond who are working in difficult circumstances and still delivering day after day. To sing for the unsung, to recognise the unrecognised.

I hear – and I hear it way too often, I’m afraid – of some less than great behaviours by some organisations and the way they are treating staff. To a degree this is to be expected with the enormous and ongoing cuts to the public sector – with 350k people leaving local government alone in the past five years there is unprecedented change taking place.

But this doesn’t excuse shoddy behaviour.

Lack of recognition has been a theme in much of the staff survey feedback I have seen over the years too. Sometimes your achievements will be appreciated by others, sometimes they’ll not be. That’s a fact of comms life, as it is in life.

And for me, part of the UnAwards is flying back into face of this and celebrating what you do and do well. We’ve been at, and are, at your coalface so we know.

So the real reason that you should enter the UnAwards is to celebrate you.

We thought it would be interesting to begin hosting a couple of Twitter Chats each month on key challenges facing the community. We kicked off with this great session on the 'ideal comms team' - it sparked a flurry of tweets and over 1.1million potential Twitter impacts.

You can always count on the comms2point0 to pitch in with ideas and thoughts when you ask them.

Last Wednesday's #IdealCommsTeam lunchtime Twitter chat was a true example of this.

The expertise, the experiences (good and bad), the challenges and the triumphs came thick and fast during a cracking hour of discussion in response to my comms2point0 post on the Ideal Comms Team last week.

Just as a reminder, there were a few key rules to the questions we asked during the conversation:

Anyone who’s run an event will know that they’re expensive things. So to complement our shared learning seminars, the Good Practice Exchange at the Wales Audit Office have been running webinars on a range of topics that affect public services. Here’s some of what we’ve learnt so far.

Start small

Doing things differently is always nerve racking. I haven’t been as nervous as the first time I clicked the ‘begin webinar’ button for quite some time. Helen Reynolds has blogged about how she’s finding her feet with podcasting and isn’t actively promoting her efforts with Ben Proctor. Similarly, our first webinar was a pilot webinar with twenty attendees from an IT seminar. If it went wrong, it wasn’t the end of the world, but fortunately it didn’t.

You have six weeks to work on your entries. Sounds plenty of time doesn't it? But the deadline will be here before you know it.

We’ve all left award entries until the last minute in the past due to other competing work demands. But is that what your best work this year deserves? No, course not.

So use the time wisely and have a think about which of the 15 categories are a best fit with the activity and projects you are most proud of. Grab a coffee, sit somewhere quiet for 10 minutes with a pencil and a piece of paper and begin sketching out your ideas or a small mind map for your entry. Focus on the best way to make it stand out from the crowd.

Well here’s the thing. I woke up this morning and for the first time in 10-years I am not a head of comms. This is a good thing because it means I have moved on to an exciting new phase of my career.

It’s an obvious time to reflect. Has 10 years of being a head of comms made me a better comms professional? And would I recommend the role to someone else? Here’s my take on it, my top tips and answers to these two simple questions.

I have had some fantastic opportunities. Worked with some brilliant colleagues. Won over a dozen industry awards with them and learned way more than you could ever capture in a single post. I have also sat in some dreary meetings. Had to argue the case for comms, over and over and over and over, and crossed swords with some quite unpleasant people. The rough with the smooth. You know the score.

comms2point0.co.uk is a shared learning space, created by – and written for – creative communications professionals. Home to fresh comment, informed opinion, in depth analysis and expert feature articles, comms2point.co.uk inspires and supports communications professionals in the UK, Europe and beyond.